Women and Leadership inthe News Media 2020 : Evidence from Ten Markets

Top editorial positions in major news outlets matter both substantially and symbolically. Top editors make important decisions every day, which their personal experiences will, in part, sometimes influence. Top editors also represent their outlets, and collectively help represent the news media more broadly, and the diversity (or lack thereof) of top editors is thus symbolically important and likely to shape how news media are perceived by different parts of the public. It is thus important to focus specifically on top editors and their background both to understand more about how journalism is done and how it come across to the rest of society (Allsop et al. 2018; Duffy 2019). Our analysis supplements important research conducted by others working on the status of women in the news media. Similar recent studies include, among others, a report by the International Women’s Media Foundation published in 2011 that found 27% of top management jobs occupied by women across a sample of more than 500 media companies in nearly 60 countries (IWMF 2011); the regular Who Makes the News? reports released by the Global Media Monitoring Project every five years, which in 2015 found that women make up only 24% of the people heard, read about or seen in newspaper, television and radio news across news content collected from 114 countries (Macharia 2015); and regular reports focusing on individual countries, such as the research conducted by the Women’s Media Center in the United States and the organisation Women in Journalism in the UK, which in 2017 found that 34 percent of senior roles in UK national newspapers were occupied by women. We also build on a number of important academic studies including, for example, the work of Karen Ross (2014) analysing women in decision-making positions across 99 major European media houses in 28 EU member states, which found women occupied 30% of senior or executive positions in the organisations surveyed; Suzanne Frank’s (2013) work on how changes in digital media have presented both challenges and opportunities for women working in journalism; and empirical research like the work done by Nikki Usher et al. (2018) documenting how gendered echo chambers amplifies gender biases online